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Editorial

Merry Christmas

Times change but the spirit of the holiday remains the same

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Wednesday December 25, 2013 5:14 AM

Charities have done their best to provide a holiday for those in need. Kroger is offering tasty
specials. And there’s a trend of daughters taking over their father’s businesses.

Those headlines, plausible on this Christmas 2013, actually are from Christmas 1913.

On a day steeped with nostalgia, we thought we’d take a look back at Christmas’ past, 50 and 100
years ago, and reminisce.

People haven’t changed much as far as the gizmos they hanker for — even if it is a Philco stereo
cabinet that takes up half the living-room wall. Imagine telling people in 1963 that someday all
those record albums would be stored in a device that fits in their pocket. Oh, it is also their
telephone, calendar and camera.

But on Christmas 1963, NASA was still working out technical problems with space flight,
The Columbus Evening Dispatch reported. (Ohioan Neil Armstrong wouldn’t land on the moon
for another six years.)

Another air traveler caught a break: The Federal Aviation Agency granted a waiver from certain
air-traffic rules to a “prominent Arctic aviator and philanthropist,” also known as Santa.

A little levity was nice. The nation was in a somber mood and on the brink of a social
revolution: President Kennedy had been slain a month earlier; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had
delivered his “I have a Dream Speech” that August; and Betty Friedan’s book,
The Feminine Mystique, was out.

The 1963
Dispatch Christmas editorial reflected the desire for serenity: “How much more pleasant,
satisfying and rewarding we find that life can be during the brief period out of each busy year
when we pause and invite the miracle of the Christmas spirit to work its age-old magic.”

The Christmas 1913
Columbus Evening Dispatch hints at looming social changes, reporting, “Debutantes in
official society circles have taken up housekeeping and running their fathers’ establishments as
one of the very latest useful fads.”

The 1913 paper advertised a turkey dinner at a Downtown restaurant for 25 cents. For home cooks,
Kroger offered such holiday delicacies as fresh oysters, mince meat and plum pudding.

Meanwhile, on Christmas Day 1913, the
Ohio State Journal wrote that charities had done their best to help 2,500 families “in
hard circumstances and send out things that cheer so that Christmas Day, at least, will not have
the gloomy air of destitution about.”

On Christmas Eve, hundreds waited outside the Statehouse for the lighting of the Christmas tree.
“All classes and all stations mingled at the foot of the giant spruce. Little waifs, shivering with
cold, stood with sparkling eyes ... Next to them were men and women dressed in furs, just stepped
from automobiles to take part in the community Christmas. Then there were business men, office
employees, clerks, most of them with packages under their arms.”

The
Journal’s Christmas editorial was eloquent, offering words to live by today.

“All the traditions of this day tell of kindness, gentleness, sacrifice, peace and good will. It
is these graces that make the day sacred. Nor must they be looked up as mere sentiments that rise
like misty exhalations and quickly fade away. They are real things, as real as rock or soil or
mountain. The realest things in this world are what touch the heart.”